What Will It Take? [View All]

[DaveT]

I confess.

I get depressed at Democratic Underground. Instead of getting jazzed by the shared consciousness, I despair at the the lack of consensus.

I am talking about the big picture, the overarching point of view that explains why our country is in so much trouble now -- with debt of all kinds clouding our future; with idiotic wars of failed conquest on the Asian land mass; with the Constitution ripped to shreds; with the Federal Government run by grafters; with our Party's leadership in Congress utterly failing to mount any realistic challenge to the madness; and, with a long list of domestic priorities un-addressed for decades due to the debt, the wars, the Executive Branch running amok, the graft and political imbalance all uniting to make progress impossible.

How did it come to this dire pass?

I think we have close to a consensus on how to answer that question. Corporations and wealthy individuals spend a lot of money on politics and public relations. This money controls our politics and most of our public life -- lowering taxes, curtailing business regulations, ginning up wars and threats of war to rationalize war profiteering and protecting their puppet politicians from democratic accountability. Look through the archives of DU, and you will find an immense body of information and commentary about this stark reality and how disastrous it is for the rule of law and popular government.

Yet our consensus breaks down as soon as we consider what action it takes to counter the short-sighted profit mongering that is driving our Nation toward catastrophe. Without a unified opposition, nothing is going to change.

I am just a lonely voice in the wilderness, not well known here. But I don't think this situation is all that hard to understand and I don't see why more people don't seem to want to face this reality.

We have learned from the elections of 2000, 2004 and 2006 that the act of voting does not by itself counter the massive problem of corporate domination of our social order. Yet it is clear that many of us are harboring hopes, again, that the election of Kucinich or Edwards or Biden or Obama or Rodham Clinton or Mike Gravel or Al Gore will somehow turn the tide. I am not saying that anybody should ignore the Presidential election or decline to vote. But I am saying that you must not be paying attention if you think that electoral politics by itself is going to reverse our slide toward economic collapse and political tyranny.


This is from a post I entered here last June:

This is the weirdest time yet in the ongoing nightmare of post-9-11 America. Here at Democratic Underground, you can find threads with speculation about how Bush and Cheney must have a massive blackmail operation going on to intimidate the Democratic politicians from taking action, or worse -- that the Democratic politicians are physically afraid of meeting Paul Wellstone's fate.

Another operating hypothesis with a lot of adherents holds that the Dems are just cowardly about taking any kind of stand without there being anything to fear. These posters are invariably angry and often sarcastic, painting a totally bleak picture of our paralyzed government, offering no hope for democracy.

Then there are some die-hard Democratic party loyalists who have been making tactical arguments about the unwisdom of impeachment for various reasons: it would distract from important legislative goals; it would blow up in our faces politically as there is no national majority in favor of it; it would fail in the Senate regardless.

Among the paranoid fantasts, the pouting fatalists who condemn the Dems, and the myopic party loyalists repeating the thin rationalizations offered by Pelosi and Reid, the common denominator is that they all cast themselves as observers of democracy rather than participants.

To be sure, there are a lot of people at DU who do advocate direct action through pressure on our Congressional Representatives -- which is how Democracy is supposed to work on paper. But it amazes me how many people are motivated enough to post on the internet but only to wallow in their own powerlessness. O, woe be unto us -- as the Bush Crime Family has its boot on the throat of Congress. O, we are screwed -- as the Dems are too weak and too complicit in the Bush assault on democracy to do their jobs as Members of Congress. O, gosh, the political scenario just doesn't work out to allow for a continuation of Constitutional government.



Passive, passive, passive -- I call it the TV Generation mindset. The internet allows us powerless souls the privilege of commenting on the comings and goings of the powerful, yet we remain nobody ourselves, because nobody has ever heard of us. This mindset betrays a bizarre self-dis-empowerment.

Ever since Florida 2000, I have believed that this extremely well organized assault on the rule of law will only be defeated by the direct action of millions of Americans. The problem for Bush and his relatively small cadre of supporters is that demographic changes have put an end to the Reagan Coalition's majority status. They can maintain their grip on power only by dismantling democracy -- which they have systematically been busy doing for nearly seven years now. We can win, but we have to quit whining and start taking action.

We have to get millions of people to join us in confronting the Congress with the bitter truth about the Bush Administration. It is trying to destroy the Constitution. The only reason why Bush has not yet been brought to heel is that we, the people, seem to think it is somebody's else's chore to save democracy.

The bet is placed -- all in. It is time to call the hand.

This attracted no comments at all.

Then, in October, I tried this:

In the October issue of Harper's Magazine, Garret Keizer put forth the idea of a general strike to take place November 6, 2007. Here are his opening paragraphs:



Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust.
—Isaiah 26:19

Of all the various depredations of the Bush regime, none has been so thorough as its plundering of hope. Iraq will recover sooner. What was supposed to have been the crux of our foreign policy—a shock-and-awe tutorial on the utter futility of any opposition to the whims of American power—has achieved its greatest and perhaps its only lasting success in the American soul. You will want to cite the exceptions, the lunch-hour protests against the war, the dinner-party ejaculations of dissent, though you might also want to ask what substantive difference they bear to grousing about the weather or even to raging against the dying of the light—that is, to any ritualized complaint against forces universally acknowledged as unalterable. Bush is no longer the name of a president so much as the abbreviation of a proverb, something between Murphy’s Law and tomorrow’s fatal inducement to drink and be merry today.

If someone were to suggest, for example, that we begin a general strike on Election Day, November 6, 2007, for the sole purpose of removing this regime from power, how readily and with what well-practiced assurance would you find yourself producing the words “It won’t do any good”? Plausible and even courageous in the mouth of a patient who knows he’s going to die, the sentiment fits equally well in the heart of a citizenry that believes it is already dead.





"It won't do any good."

He is right on the dime with that description of where we are as a nation. We look at our government, and discover that the people running it simply do not care what we think or do. We can post our angry polemics on the internet and we can gripe to each other in isolated personal conversations. But nothing we do "works."

I think his idea of a General Strike is exactly what it will take to make a change. Unfortunately, November 6 is too soon. It takes a while for a national consensus to build. So how do we get to the end point of nationwide mass action from the infinity of isolated starting points in front of our millions of individual computer screens?

Here is my suggestion:


The basic concept in the 21st Century version of the General Strike would be sort of a nation-wide Flash Mob. We would not even have to miss an entire day of work to make our point.

I propose every first Wednesday of the month, starting in December, as National Flash Mob General Strike Day -- at 2 PM Eastern time, we all walk off our jobs and go out to the pavement for 10 minutes. The next month it is 20 minutes. Then 30 and so on, until the Government removes Bush and Cheney from office, restores the Constitution and ceases combat operations in Iraq.

This scheme MUST NOT depend upon TV, radio or newspaper communications to get the message across.

Personal, interactive communications, yes. Hierarchical, one-way communication, no.




If you glance at this post and determine that this idea is as unworkable as every other scheme you've heard, would you at least do yourself the favor of posting how you think we will ever restore the rule of law?

Again, nothing.

OK, I understand that thousands of posts go up, and not everyone necessarily attracts much attention. So I don't take this personally. But I do not believe that explains this -- I think people are afraid to face the depth and breadth of the problem before us. We have seen the power of money control our government before in our history. We have also seen organized oppression deny basic human rights to millions of our citizens for generations. The only way that either the scourge of Economic Oppression or Racial Oppression have ever been successfully countered is by direct action.

I don't want to go on a national strike. I don't want to risk my job or my freedom by challenging our Government in the street. But I realize that unless millions of us do that, nothing is going to change.